Various stringed instruments may be tuned to produce specific output having tonal characteristics like, for example, a chord. The strings of the instrument may be tuned to produce a specific chord when strummed “open,” meaning with no strings depressed on a neck of the instrument. Some common open-chord tunings include an Open E tuning, an Open G tuning, an Open D tuning, a C6th tuning, E9th tuning, and the like. The key of the open chord and/or the chord itself may be altered by the player of the instrument pressing a plurality of strings at one or more positions on a neck of said instrument.
A variety of stringed instruments may implement such chord-based tuning, such as, but not limited to, a slide guitar, a lap steel, a Hawaiian steel guitar, a dobro, a resonator, and the like. Often, when playing instruments having open chord tunings, a slide bar is used to manipulate tonal characteristics of the instrument's output by pressing the slide against one or more of the strings and moving (or “sliding”) the slide about a neck of the instrument. In standard use, a standard slide will depress all the strings on the neck of a stringed instrument, effectively changing the key of the “open” version of instrument's tuning. However, a standard slide bar may limit the tonal choices of the player, making it difficult, or even impossible, to play some commonly used chords or desired string pitch changes within a chord.
While several devices have attempted to overcome the chord limitations of the standard slide, while also maintaining the tonal advantages of the standard slide, such designs are either expensive, difficult to use, or not able to reliably produce desired chords and output. For example, a pedal steel guitar may use a slide for changing the tonal chord on the strings while the user has access to pedals associated with the guitar that alter one or more strings to produce chords, optionally including desired pitch changes of one or more of the strings within a chord, not normally achievable with the standard slide alone. However, pedal slide guitars are, generally, much more expensive than a standard slide guitar as well as more complicated to play given the involvement of the hands, knees and feet. Such systems are also are also very reliant on the skilled hand and dexterity of the user.
Therefore, improved apparatus and methods for altering the tonal characteristics of a stringed instrument while using a slide-based apparatus are needed.